It’s International Women’s Day, and I thought I’d take a moment to mention some of the many, many women who have inspired me and helped me along the way. Some of them work in deliverability and compliance. Others are business colleagues. Still others are cheerleaders and inspiration. All of them make the world a better place.

Jen

April

Kristin

Kelly

Judith

Mary

Heather

Skyler

Kate

Rachel

Karen

Sue

Autumn

Lili

Mary (the other one)

Sara

Asya

Christine

Heather (the other one)

Anna

Melinda

April (the other one)

Laura (the one that’s not me)

Catherine

Tara

Jamie

Tifaine

Hope

Anna (the other one)

Josie

Alice

Kate (the other one)

Lisa

Kiersti

Laura (the other one that’s not me nor the other one )

Denise

Stephanie

Michelle

Liza

Justine

Rachel (the other one)

Jenifer

Jen (the other one)

Murph

Courtney

Sue (the other one)

Elizabeth

A giant shout out and thank you to all these women. Many of them spend their days making the Internet a safer place. That means they see some of the grottier corners that none of us want to experience.

You are all amazing and awesome and I am better for having known you.

My contribution for today is to recognize some of the amazing women I know and work with. What are doing for International Women’s Day?

Today I was discussing some mailing list posts with an ESP colleague. He was telling me some interesting numbers he’d collected from different IP pools they maintain. He was testing routing mail through IPs based on subscription process and routing based on engagement metrics. The data showed that inboxing rates were similar across the test groups. As he put it, “IP reputation didn’t have much impact on inbox delivery.”

I’m not surprised. I’ve been talking for a while about how IP reputation is less important in reaching the inbox. In fact, it was almost 5 years ago now that I wrote The Death of IP Based Reputation. I updated it in 2015 with Deliverability and IP Reputation. Overall, IP reputation is a much smaller piece of reaching the inbox now than it has been in the past. I’ve talked about the reasons for this in the above posts. The short version is:

IP reputation is a crude hammer;

IPv4 addresses are in very limited supply, in network terms more customers / IP is a good thing;

Spammers use botnets, sending large amounts of email across many IPs;

IPv6 is huge and IP based blocking will be challenging and of limited effectiveness; and

Better computing power makes content scanning more feasible.

IP Reputation Still Matters, a little

This doesn’t mean senders can, or should ignore IP reputation. Even Gmail looks at IP reputation a little bit. The place IP reputation is primarily used during the SMTP transaction. Good IP reputation does lead to less rate limiting. Senders with good IP reputation can send more mail faster than senders with poor reputation. But once the SMTP transaction is over, IP reputation is just a small factor in a large pool of variables.

IP Reputation Still Matters, a little more.

There are some places that heavily rely on IP filters. And some places that rely on certain types of IP filters. Most of the major providers will block mail from home users, dynamic IPs, and infected machines. Additionally, there is and will probably always be a long tail of domains that are still relying on IP based filters. It’s a crude hammer, but it’s an effective one. Typically, though, IP reputation in those cases is in the eye of the root user. The good news is, these are often private networks, and users have the option to use less restrictive free providers if they’re not getting the email they want.

There was an unexpected break in blogging over the last 2 weeks. Between M3AAWG, a week of house guests and some upcoming big changes I didn’t get much writing finished. I started, and am still working on, about half a dozen different posts.

Thanks for your patience, we’ll get back to our regularly scheduled writing soon.

The increase in spam placement is somewhat offset by the fact that consumers were more likely than ever to “rescue” wanted mail from the spam folder, as demonstrated by the significant year over year increase in the “this is not spam” rate (1.77% in 2017 versus 1.04% in 2016).

Subscribers read email at a slightly lower rate than last year (21.5% in 2017, 22.2% in 2016), but mail that is ignored (or “deleted before reading”) was also slightly less common than a year ago (11.9% in 2017, 12.5% in 2016).

As a digital channel, email provides a lot of different metrics for marketers to use. Not only can marketers measure things like open and click rates, but they can tie these numbers back to a particular recipient. This treasure trove of information leads to obsessing over making the numbers look good. For good deliverability senders want low bounce rates, low spamtrap rates, and high engagement rates.

These metrics are important because they’re some of the things that filters look at when making delivery decisions. We care about this data because the receiver ISPs care about the data. The ISPs care about this data because they are characteristics of wanted and/or opt in email.

Over the past few years a number of companies sell services selling good metrics.

List hygiene companies “tell you what addresses are valid.” These services can lower bounce rates, but they don’t address the underlying issue which is that a subscription process doesn’t do any data verification.

Spamtrap companies “tell you what addresses are traps.” But that’s not really what they’re doing. They’re telling you what addresses might bounce or belong to a domain that doesn’t have any actual user.

Engagement companies “tells you what addresses have any activity.” But just because a recipient interacts regularly with one type of email doesn’t actually mean they want all email.

These services attempt to mitigate poor acquisition and hygiene processes. They’re often used in lieu of ongoing good practices. In some limited cases they’re a good thing and can be used to facilitate the relationship between a recipient and a vendor they want to her from. But, overall, I don’t think they’re that great for the industry.

And, of course, that means M3AAWG is coming to town. I’m speaking on two panels this conference and will be around starting mid-day Monday. Of course, half the fun of M3AAWG is watching the swarms of posts on Facebook of friends traveling to wherever.

Those of you visiting, weather is nice. Sadly (as we’re heading back into drought) we’re not expecting rain next week. And, we’re back up at the top of the hill – across the street at the Fairmont.

You can't technical your way out of the bulk folder. I wrote that a year and a half ago, and it's even more true today. Filters at the big webmail providers continue to evolve to meet new threats and new spamming techniques. Sending technically perfect mail won't get your mail into the inbox. Recipients have to want the mail and interact with the mail for good delivery.
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